Customer Reviews

Transa

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This record is a masterpiece of tropicalia music. The Context: The tropicalia poet has been sent into exile in London by the forces of repression and artistic control in Brasil.

London, 1970: at the height of hippie culture. Surrounded by the sounds of 1960's British rock, the harsh noise of the English language, with the warmth of tropical Brasil and the soft Portuguese language only dreams and memories in a primitive, neolithic, rock-dominated nightmare of exile. He wakes up in the morning, singing an old Beatles song. It is a long way back to his homeland.

At home, in Brasil, the Poet is a star. In England he is a just a long-haired South American man with a guitar and a funny accent. He hears his voice among others... just a common man. His presence in London goes unnoticed. ... "You don't know me..." he says and "You won't see me." He feels anonymous and the feeling pervades these songs.

He has no idea when or if he will ever be allowed to return to his homeland. He might as well learn to play rock chords and sing in English. But it is awkward. He cannot take the hippies or the rock-&-rollers completely serious. He is an outsider to their ideas and life style. He mocks them: "You sing about waking up in the morning but your never up before noon!"

And he cannot escape his memory and his language. Bits of Portuguese surface up from his subconscious, even as he struggles to sing and write in this new, rhyme-less language. Verses in Portuguese force themselves into his English songs. The sound of cuicas and bossa nova chords intervene, even as he tries to play his guitar in the English style. But the sounds of Brasil, and the sounds of Portuguese words, come across as hallucinations, chunks of dream, trance-inducing (trance, a play on words on the title "transa", which is itself a word full of sexual, sensuous overtones).

The Poet goes into the streets of London. He walks down the street and hears a tropical sound: but it is just reggae, not the samba and bossa nova sound of his home land. He remembers a lesson from his days as a school boy, another poet 300 years his elder, Gregorio de Mattos, whose outrageous art earned him the nickname "Hell Mouth" and earned him an exile in Angola. "Triste Bahia" becomes a sort of seance, a dialogue of exiled poet to exiled poet, across the cosmos and the centuries, a communion of language and rhythms that evoke a homeland, Bahia, from which they have both been expelled.

So much for the context, now for the music. It is amazing how dreamy it is while maintaining a bare, minimalist production. No lush tracks recorded one on top of the next. Just a man, a microphone, an acoustic guitar, some background percussionists, and a bassist. If you close your eyes it almost sounds like you are in the sound studio with Caetano as he plays. And how he plays! Every one of these tracks is an amazing typically tropicalia journey to the limits of the accepted, conventional norms of mainstream music. Each starts off soft and conventional, and then builds, builds, repeats, repeats, until finally you are overwhelmed with the absolute force of the noise coming out of your speakers. And then silence. And typically a return to the beginning again.

Originally released in England in late 1971, "Transa" (Making Out), was the last of the three albums that Caetano Veloso recorded while in London. The songs are longer and a bit more complex, and five of the seven tracks are written in English. The fabulous "Triste Bahia" features excerpts from the poetry of Gregório de Mattos. Shortly after his return home in 1972, "Barra 69" (a live recording of the last show Caetano and Gilberto Gil did before their exile) came out, followed by the Brazilian release of "Transa" (complete with a 3-D album cover), insuring Caetano's triumphant comeback. This disc is a milestone in his career, marking the end of his 'English' period and hinting at the musical experimentation that he would push further on subsequent releases. It's among the best of his early records and definitely worth checking out.

I became an addicted listener to Caetano Veloso when I was around 15. Twenty years have passed but my great genius of the Brazilian music still keeps visiting my home day after day and heartbeats assault me nervously whenever a new cd springs up or a show calls for me. To tell the truth, I still can't help feeling excited with Caetano Veloso, really.

The 'Transa' record goes back to 1972 and it's among those Top10 records of our lives which I would take to that desert island all of us have already been invited to visit. 'Transa' was recorded during the London phase of Caetano, when he and Gilberto Gil were forced to exile for political and dictatorial reasons. It is a superb record, full of a wide musical richness, where silence achieves a never-heard dimension. Marked by solitude and also by the fact that he was living in a foreign country, 'Transa' shows a Caetano with traces of musical psychedelism, geniously seasoned with musical flavours from Northeast of Bahia, his homeland. The father of Tropicalism gave birth to an album with a strong identity, strongly winking at the European sound (many of his songs are sung in English), with several references to rock (one of the flagships of Tropicalism), to the Beatles ('woke up this morning / singing an old, old Beatles song' , in 'It's a Long Way') , but still deeply Brazilian. It's a record made by an unknown singer in the London of that time, a record by someone that lived in a country that he didn't know and that wouldn't dare to expect his music being fully understood by those to whom he would open the door of his talent. Solitude and depression that he was facing at that time blurred some musical freshness, categorically evidenced in some of his Brazilian albums. There is no room for doubt when Caetano sings: 'You don't know me / bet you'll never get to know me / you don't know me at all.', in the opening track.
'Transa ' is a conceptual album about homesickness, about absence, about his anguish imprisoned in European walls, about nostalgia and its own marks engraved on music, on his Popular Brazilian music, on rock'n roll which Tropicalism merged with to expand and that definitely changed everything about the sound produced in Brazil. As Caetano sings in 'Nostalgia', the last track of the record: 'That's what rock'n roll is all about / I mean, that's what rock'n roll was all about.'
The best justice that we can do to 'Transa' is, obviously, listening to it from the bottom of our hearts.

Caetano también estuvo en el exilio. Y artísticamente parece que le hizo muy bien. No he escuchado, hasta el momento, más material sobre aquél período pero "Transa" es sin duda una joya. Dentro de su buenas canciones, para mí destacan dos que son representativas: "You Don't Know Me" y "Mora na filosofia". La primera, como me dijo un amigo, "parece Lou Reed". Es rock tradicional británico setentero, pero con la cadencia del samba y un aura melancólica que es la que acompaña al resto del álbum. El segundo tema en cuestión es casi épico, largo, bien logrado, triste y único. En este disco, a diferencia de varios otros de la discografía de Caetano, se presenan pocos temas pero largos, con secciones instrumentales prolongadas. Sin recargos, simple, directo, improvisado y complejo a la vez. "Transa" es una obra maestra que sigue la línea comenzada por el mismo Caetano y seguida por Os Mutantes.

There is a sheer abandon to this album more than any of the others I've heard. Long songs, rambling Afro-polyrhythmic-driven percussion extravaganzas (it's perfect for long-distance running) and typically quirky Veloso songwriting which takes its budding mastery of English a step further than he had on the "London, London" album. "Triste Bahia" is a miracle unto itself. Rumored to have been Telly Savalas' favorite CV album as well.

Saudade meaning longing in Portuguese,it must have invaded Caetano while creating this album.He was about to return to Brazil from exile when he embarked in this project.Eventually a cult disc and not a commercially succesful LP,TRANSA(making love)has its ups and downs.The English language tracks are a mixed bag while the Portuguese language songs are definite hits.Mora na Filosofia is my favorite.Not the best work of Veloso,but not the worst either.

Heart-wrenching. "Triste Bahia" and, particularly, "It's a Long Way" are standouts; the complex rhythms (I dare you to stand still while listening to this song!), the mix of the Portuguese and English language, the unbearable pain you hear in his voice denote the hell of exile and the desperate yearning to return to the place of his birth. This is some of the most amazing singing from Caetano.

Caetano's son, Moreno, wrote a song to him called How beautiful can a Being Be!. WE Agree! A Divo from Brazil.

There's definitely a reason that this one's #10 on that All-Time Greatest Brazilian Albums Ever list referenced earlier... this plays as a documentary of what it really feels like to be in exile as well as a seductive and fun musical experience.

The song that kills me is the "Nine Out of Ten" song... the way CV articulates the simultaneous feelings of displacement from Brazil and the alienation he feels from England come fully across;the repetitious refrain (repetition is a form of change, to quote the Oblique Strategy) about how 90% of film stars make him cry, and how this makes him feel alive, conveys a sarcasm and a ridicule in such a fun way that it opens you to really get the conflicted complexities he must have been experiencing at the time, no small feat.

Since, for me anyway, the purpose of Art is to convey just such kinds of complex aspects of the artists' human experience into their work so the rest of us can correlate what they say to a better understanding of ourselves, what we feel and how that process lends our human experience more clarity and flavor, well there's just no way this album gets less than 5 stars... I'd give it ten out of ten if I could and if were asked to describe it in one sentence I would say it represents 7 snapshots showing the realities of indeterminate removal from one's geographical and sociocultural comfort zone: A Drama of Exile.

And you can funk to it; this whole album grooves along in a sort of relaxed, percussion-spiced flow reminiscent of the albums of Osibisa or Assagai. I also think the earlier review referencing microdottage was correct... I saw a vinyl boxed set of Veloso's London-period albums (plus the completely lysergic Araca Azul that followed them when he returned to Bahia) and I joked to my friend it should have been subtitled "On Acid and In English".

I'm with the YAYsayers on this one: essential listening of historical proportions and an unavoidable touchstone of progressive MPB worthy of the hype IMO.

I thought I was a Caetano fan until I bought Transa (I have Cualquer Coisa, which I like very much except for the Beatles cover tunes). And the reason I bought Transa was all the glowing amazon.com reviews. Though the music is good, the lyrics are very repititious and insipid (especially the English lyrics). I mean: "Nine out of ten movie stars make me cry...I'm alive" That's bad enough once, but repeated ten times more, it's painful. I want more Caetono Veloso, but which records I don't know.
Transa is almost unlistenable...but maybe I just have a low tolerance for repititious lyrics. Good luck!